Perspective Construal Operation-Based British National Image Construction

National image refers to an overall impression derived from self-awareness and other country's evaluation.Therefore,it contains two concepts: domestic image and international image.Having many communication channels like world politics,international media,and public life,national image is mainly constructed through language.A good national image is the symbol of possession of strong soft power.It can further affect the discourse power of a country in the international society.As a discourse analyzing theory that incorporates many other disciplines,critical discourse analysis(CDA)focuses on the relationship between language,power and ideology.Traditional CDA researches put too much emphasis on discourse analysis and ignore the participants of discourse.This leads to the absence of analysis in discourse production and understanding.Combining theories on cognitive linguistics and CDA together may help to remedy this defect.Using perspective construal operation as its analyzing tool,this article analyzes British national image construction from the cognitive perspective angle.Different perspectives construal operations may reflect different kinds of perspective of the observer.Straddling various levels of discourse analysis,embodiments of perspective are rich and diverse.Accordingly,this article also has a three-level analytical framework including aspects like lexeme,syntax and text.The author first chooses three parameters like personal pronoun,tense and aspect to conduct the lexical level analysis.Personal pronoun can affect speaker's narrative perspective;tense is related to temporal perspective while aspect,as a means to change listener's attitude,is a kind of language marker of ideological perspective.As for the syntactic level,the author chooses voice as its observation point,which is ultimately subjected to speaker's spatial perspective.On the textual level,main focuses of the analysis are topics through which the text structure is restricted and speaker's perceptual perspective is manipulated.The study finds that May has constructed Britain from three aspects: a responsible well-governed country for its citizens,an independent while open country for other European countries and also a global,peace-loving,responsible and humanitarian country in the international society.All in all,British national image construction analyses can also be used for reference for China.At the same time,the combination of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis also enriches the analytical tools in the field of CDA.